


then and now

by skeilig



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti)
Genre: Love Confessions, M/M, Making Out, Memory, Non-Explicit Sex, Nostalgia, Remix, san junipero au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-26
Updated: 2020-09-26
Packaged: 2021-03-08 02:15:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,284
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26528104
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/skeilig/pseuds/skeilig
Summary: “What?” Eddie asks, chuckling. “Why would I want to re-live my teen years? Once was enough.”“I dunno.” Richie ducks his head in a shy little gesture. “Closure.”“Oh.” With a start, Eddie realizes what Richie means. “You want to– what? Act it out?”Or, Eddie and Richie get a chance to recreate the past. (San Junipero AU)
Relationships: Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier
Comments: 16
Kudos: 67
Collections: Derry Remixed 2020





	then and now

**Author's Note:**

  * For [trashing-the-trashmouth (summerforbran)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/summerforbran/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Like We Were Yesterday](https://archiveofourown.org/works/24446647) by [trashing-the-trashmouth (summerforbran)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/summerforbran/pseuds/trashing-the-trashmouth). 



> This is a remix of trashing-the-trashmouth’s lovely San Junipero (Black Mirror) AU, Like We Were Yesterday. The fic features Richie and Eddie at the end of their lives reconnecting inside a simulation.

Richie’s childhood home looks the same, the familiar walls and scuffed floors and family portraits. It almost smells the same too, like the dinners that Mrs. Tozier would make, and the cigars that Dr. Tozier smoked on special occasions. Eddie’s own childhood home had an oppressive perfume aura, flowery and choking, like desperately trying to preserve something that was decaying. The Toziers’ smelled like oak and bread in the oven, like life and warmth. 

Eddie hasn’t quite grown accustomed to this yet, just how vivid all his senses are. Apparently San Junipero draws on memories, but some of these were buried so deep that Eddie could have never dredged them up on his own. But all at once the familiar smell ushers in a flood of other memories, and the effect is sort of overwhelming, a feedback loop of remembering and experiencing and remembering more. 

Eddie leads the way up the stairs. He pauses at the top and glances over his shoulder to see that Richie is no longer in his broad, scruffy, middle-aged body. Now he looks the way he did the last time they saw each other in person, the summer after they graduated and Eddie left Derry. Eddie looks him up and down, taking in his long gangly limbs, shaggy hair, thick glasses. His smooth cheeks and narrow jaw, the rest of his face not quite grown into his high-bridged nose. 

The impact of seeing Richie the way that Eddie knew him sharpens the nostalgia until it’s a knife in his gut. 

“I didn’t realize you could do that,” Eddie says as casually as he can manage. He crosses his arms, feeling weirdly vulnerable and young himself. 

Richie shrugs and pushes past him, heading down the hallway with his loping, long-legged gate. “Yeah, I think the default is like, mid-thirties, hence the…” He gestures back at Eddie’s body. “Maybe that’s based on survey research or something. When was the prime of your life, and everything. But you can do whatever you want.”

“Hm,” Eddie hums distractedly, following Richie toward his bedroom. His clothes changed, too. He’s in jeans and a loud patterned t-shirt.

Richie spins around to stop in the doorframe, blocking Eddie’s path with one arm. His elbow looks so knobby at the midpoint of his skinny arm. “So.” He nods at Eddie. “You too. Come on.”

“What?” Eddie asks, chuckling. “Why would I want to re-live my teen years? Once was enough.” 

“I dunno.” Richie ducks his head in a shy little gesture. “Closure.”

“Oh.” With a start, Eddie realizes what Richie means. “You want to– what? Act it out?”

“Yeah, why not.” Richie turns around and takes two steps across his bedroom before collapsing onto the mattress. His shoulders are narrower but he’s pretty tall, having shot up a few inches later in high school. 

“Okay.” Eddie takes a couple unsure steps forward until he’s in the doorframe. He shakes out his arms. “How do I…?”

“You just did,” Richie tells him—and sure enough. Eddie’s a couple inches shorter now, skinnier, his hair a bit longer and soft. He looks down at himself, ill-fitting jeans and white sneakers.

“Oh, okay.” Eddie clears his throat, not able to shake how silly he feels for going along with this. “Um, Richie,” he starts.

“Nuh-uh-uh,” Richie sings, wagging a finger at him. “Take this seriously.” He flops back against his bed and opens a comic book over his head. “Knock at my window.”

“Really?” Eddie rolls his eyes a little. 

“Yes,” Richie insists. “This is important for the mise-en-scène.”

“For the mise—what? Okay, fine.” 

Eddie jogs back down the stairs and leaves the house, running around to the side yard. And once he’s there, it does feel familiar, knocking at Richie’s window, because as much as he liked Richie’s parents they couldn’t be trusted not to mention to his mother that they’d seen him at the house when he was supposed to be at the church’s youth group.

Richie’s window is only half a story up. Eddie picks up a stick and hurls it; it hits the glass with an impotent _thunk_. A moment later, Richie slides the window open. 

“Heya Eds!” he calls, grinning goofily. His teeth were more crooked back then, too, but in a charming way. He must have had some orthodontic work done in adulthood after going into the entertainment industry. 

“Hi Richie, um…” Eddie’s face is burning. He’s decidedly not good at this. Anything in the realm of acting or roleplay always left him intensely embarrassed and self-conscious, even something as innocuous as practice interviews. “I– I just wanted to– uh.” 

“Hi,” Richie says again, cutting over his stammering. “Do you have something to tell me?”

“Yeah, I’m… I’m leaving town?” Eddie says it like a question without meaning to, squinting up at him in the bright afternoon.

“What? What do you mean?” Richie’s a pretty good actor, apparently; his brow is furrowed, his eyes wide and innocent behind his glasses. It looks like it is the first time he’s hearing this, and not something that happened decades ago. 

Eddie is not such a good actor. “Yeah, I’m running away, like I’m…” He makes an empty gesture around himself. “I’m leaving tonight. I’ve been saving up, and I– I can’t take it anymore.”

Richie stares at him for a moment. There’s a ghost of an amused smile on his face. “Well, come in,” he says finally. “Door’s unlocked, let yourself in. My parents aren’t home.”

Eddie makes an indignant expression. “Richie, are you—?”

Richie snickers, briefly dropping his head to the windowsill. 

“After you made me go all the way down here?” 

Eddie finds another stick and whips it toward the window. Richie yelps and ducks, still laughing. 

Eddie runs back up the stairs and down the hallway, laughing helplessly to himself. When he reaches Richie’s bedroom door, he says, “Okay, Richie,” expecting the game to be over.

But Richie is perched on the edge of his single bed, looking at him, his expression serious. “Why didn’t you tell me you were planning to leave?”

“Oh.” Eddie takes a few unsteady steps across the room. He pulls out Richie’s desk chair to sit across from him. His desk is cluttered with textbooks and scrawled notes and doodles, littered snack wrappers and bottle caps. 

“I could’ve helped you,” Richie says. His voice is low and he stares at the hands folded in his lap. “I had some money.” 

“Well.” Eddie shrugs, his stomach clenching with a mix of regret and shame. There’s no changing the past. But, in a sense, they’re in the past now. It feels like it, anyway. So Eddie looks at him and says, “You can come with me. Pack your bags.”

Richie glances up, his expression faltering, twitching into a smile. “Yeah?” 

“Yeah, right now,” Eddie says, hopping up from the chair. 

They spend twenty minutes or so rifling through Richie’s closet and drawers, laughing at his horrible clothes and discovering mementos, things tucked away into drawers and forgotten in pockets. Tokens from the Capitol Theater arcade, movie stubs from Nightmare on Elm Street. Richie stuffs shirts into a duffel bag only for Eddie to take them out and try to fold them. 

“What are you doing?” Richie asks, and they’re both laughing, Eddie almost too hard to fold the shirt. 

“They’re gonna get wrinkled,” he explains. It’s a pointless exercise, of course, because they’re not actually going anywhere, but it feels like what he should do. 

When the bag is packed, they both collapse onto the bed, still laughing deliriously. They turn toward each other. 

“Where will we go first?” Richie asks him. He’s grinning and his hair falls into his eyes. 

“We can make it to New York tonight,” Eddie says, his voice barely above a whisper. 

“Where after that?” Richie inches closer on the bed, shifting forward. His bent knees bump into Eddie’s. Their hands are almost touching on the bedspread. Eddie’s fingers twitch. 

“I don’t know. Maybe Chicago.”

“And after that?” Richie moves closer still, smiling. Eddie can feel his breath on his face. 

“Anywhere,” Eddie whispers. “West.”

Richie kisses him. His lips are soft and sweet. His hand is warm on the side of Eddie’s face. 

When he pulls back after only a couple seconds, his hand skims down over Eddie’s neck. Richie blinks owlishly behind his glasses. They’re a little askew, the frames pushed up from where his head rests against the mattress. Without saying anything, Eddie reaches out and carefully removes his glasses, folds them, and sits up to place them on the bedside table. When he turns back to Richie, he’s laying flat on his back and watching Eddie. His hair’s a little ruffled, and his face looks soft and fuzzy without his glasses. 

Eddie hovers over him for a moment, carefully placing his hand beside Richie’s shoulder to prop himself up. Richie’s breathing hard already, his chest rising and falling. Eddie kisses him again.

It’s been a long time since Eddie has kissed someone like this. It all feels new in this young body, gangly limbs and soft skin, bones aching with growth. He runs his hand down over Richie’s chest, flat and skinny, not able to put on weight any faster than he grew in height. Richie rests his arms around Eddie’s waist, his touch light but persistent, fingers spread across the small of his back. Eddie kisses him and kisses him, negotiating noses and tongues and the tilt of their heads. They shift until they’re lying across the length of the narrow bed, Richie’s head on the pillow and Eddie half on top of him, legs tangled together. 

Eddie pulls back with a shaky sigh. Richie’s eyes open slowly, heavily lidded. He slides his hands up Eddie’s back to rest over his shoulderblades. Eddie lets his forehead rest against Richie’s. 

Richie smiles and asks, “Have you ever been kissed?”

Eddie snorts. “Richie, I was married.”

“No,” Richie says. “Not now, then.” He lifts his chin to press a kiss to Eddie’s jaw. “Had you ever been kissed? Or am I your first?”

Eddie understands his meaning and his stomach swoops. “No,” he whispers. “No, I hadn’t ever kissed anyone.”

“Me neither,” Richie tells him. “I lied about it, but yeah, total virgin all through high school.” He rolls his eyes at himself before confessing, “I wanted you to be my first.”

“I am,” Eddie says, his chest swelling. “I am your first.”

He kisses him again and it’s easy to get caught up in it, as the difference between the first time and the first time in a long time becomes negligible. They roll around until Eddie ends up lying flat on his back, Richie on top of him, his hands slid up inside the back of Eddie’s shirt. Richie mouths at Eddie’s neck and ear, making him shiver. 

“Can you, uh… have sex in here?” Eddie wonders aloud. He can feel Richie hard through two layers of jeans, pressing against his thigh. 

“Can you have sex in here?” Richie repeats, deadpan. He lifts his head to smirk at him. “Edward. What would be the point of all of this if you couldn’t have sex in here? Seriously.” 

“Okay, okay,” Eddie laughs, trying to pull Richie back down to him. “Stupid question.”

Richie resists, still grinning down at him. “You underestimate both human ingenuity and human horniness.” 

Eddie surges up to kiss him, to shut him up, and it works, even though they both laugh into it for a few seconds. Eddie runs his fingers through Richie’s soft hair and cradles his jaw and kisses him until Richie stops laughing and starts breathing broken little sounds into Eddie’s mouth. From there, they speak in soft voices— _Can I…? Yes. Please_ —and reach with searching hands. 

“I love you,” Richie tells him, shuddering into the crook of his neck. “Then and now.”

“I loved you, too,” Eddie says against his hair. “I still do.”

After, they lay curled toward each other on top of the sheets. Richie plays with Eddie’s fingers, poking at the pads of his fingertips and at the dip between each knuckle.

“Good thing you didn’t get taken out in the middle of that,” he mutters, the corner of his mouth twitching up. 

Eddie smiles. “Yeah, that would have been disappointing.”

“Real anticlimactic,” Richie mutters. There’s a beat of silence before his face breaks into a wide grin at his own joke.

“Oh my god.” Eddie groans and buries his face into the sheets between them, hearing Richie’s snorting laughter. 

Richie shifts closer to him, gathering Eddie in his arms and drawing him into his chest. “How much longer do you think you have?”

“I’m not sure,” Eddie says. “Probably not much longer. My sense of time in here is…” He waves his hand. 

“Okay, well. One for the road, then.” Richie tilts up Eddie’s chin with two fingers and kisses him. It’s slow and unhurried, and more practiced now in the way that Richie presses his teeth against Eddie’s lip and opens his mouth to the slide of his tongue.

* * *

Eddie opens his eyes to the bright, sterile white room that he hasn’t left in months. He blinks a few times until his eyes adjust to the light. The rushing in his ears subsides and he hears the steady beeping of monitors.

He nods his thanks to the nurse who removes the nodes from his temples and packs them up until next week. She asks him if he needs anything before leaving the room. 

Alone, Eddie looks down at his hands, folded atop the white bedspread, the paper-thin skin and dark veins. He smiles to himself, remembering.


End file.
